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African Union Conference Addresses Pregnant and Parenting Students
The African Union Commission and its specialized agency on girls and women’s education is currently hosting a conference in Addis Ababa with government ministers, education experts, and civil society representatives to accelerate progress on girls’ and women’s education.
Fifty-one million girls are out of school across Africa. Globally, nine of the ten countries with the highest education exclusion rates for girls are in sub-Saharan Africa, according to recent UNESCO data.
It is encouraging that issues faced by pregnant and parenting students are firmly on the agenda. One in every five girls in Africa is pregnant before age 19. Thousands of girls who are pregnant or parenting are not in school. Girls often face insurmountable barriers to staying in school, which leads to low school retention and even lower completion.
Girls experience the consequences of prevailing negative and discriminatory policies, and attitudes often push them to end their education abruptly. Human Rights Watch’s comprehensive index shows mixed practices in how AU member countries hinder or protect girls’ right to education. While most African countries have policies related to pregnant or parenting students, the responses of many governments are lacking. To address girls’ needs, governments should find an approach that binds education, health, and social protection systems to adequately support girls who are bearing the brunt of becoming parents at a very young age.
This is where the African Union plays a key role: it should tap into its convening power and ability to propose AU-wide policy frameworks to guide member states in effectively implementing human rights obligations.
At the Addis Ababa conference, AU institutions, including its human rights bodies, should encourage African governments to proactively examine education policy frameworks and their implementation in schools. They should also heed calls for the AU to work on a continental framework to guide governments on the rights of girls who are pregnant or parenting. The AU and other education actors supporting African governments should encourage all governments to adopt robust human rights-compliant policy frameworks to guide school officials, teachers, and others working in the education system.
The Delusion, Once Again, of a ‘Safe Zone’ in Syria
Here we go again. Since shortly after the beginning of Syria’s civil war, countries faced with the prospect of hosting Syrian refugees have touted the idea of “safe areas” within Syria to which refugees could be returned, despite the fact that such zones historically have frequently been unsafe, even treacherous. Turkey has tried to carve out such an area, which is demonstrably among the most dangerous places in the country. Not to be deterred, some European Union countries are at it again.
The Czech Republic is reportedly organizing a fact-finding mission to establish a safe zone in Syria that would enable EU countries to deport Syrian refugees to a supposed safe spot there where they won’t be harmed. They have their eyes on Damascus and Tartous, both in government-held areas. The article reporting on it says the mission “may also involve Cyprus, which has pushed to establish so-called safe zones in Syria for those returning.”
Cyprus is not waiting for the results of any fact-finding mission but has already been pushing back boats of Syrian refugees to Lebanon, whose armed forces have a record of summarily deporting Syrians to Syria. Cyprus has also suspended asylum processing for all Syrians in Cyprus. Cyprus has simply closed its eyes to the reality that the very same Syrian government that caused more than half a million deaths and 12 million people to be forcibly displaced since 2011 is still in power.
Let’s be clear: in a country with a purely localized threat, in which the central government is not implicated, it might be reasonable to expect an internally displaced person to seek refuge within government-controlled areas of their own country before seeking asylum outside the country.
That is not the case in Syria.
Syria’s central government of President Bashar al-Assad is the persecutor, and while it may not exercise effective control across all the country, there is not a safe zone anywhere within it – government controlled or not.
If the Czech, Cypriot, and other European officials prepping for this mission recognized that basic reality, they could save European taxpayers the cost of their airfare and cancel this ill-advised trip.
Brazil Prevents Meta from Using People to Power Its AI
Yesterday, Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority issued a preliminary ban on Meta's use of personal data of users based in Brazil to train its artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
The decision stems from “the imminent risk of serious and irreparable damage or difficult-to-repair damage to the fundamental rights of the affected data subjects,” the agency said in announcing the ban.
The news follows Human Rights Watch reporting in June that personal photos of Brazilian children are used to build powerful AI tools without their knowledge or consent. In turn, others use these tools to create malicious deepfakes, putting even more children at risk of harm.
The National Data Protection Authority’s decision included two arguments that reflected Human Rights Watch’s recommendations. The first is the importance of protecting children’s data privacy, given the risk of harm and exploitation that results from their data being scraped and used by AI systems. The second centers on purpose limitation, and that people’s expectations of privacy when they share their personal data online—in some cases, years or decades before these AI systems were built—should be respected.
Meta has been using its US-based users’ publicly-posted personal data to train its AI models since last year. Last month, Meta paused its plans to do the same in Europe and the United Kingdom after objections from 11 data protection authorities. Yesterday’s decision effectively bans this practice in Brazil and imposes a daily fine of 50,000 reais, or about US$9,000, for failure to comply within five working days from notification of the decision.
Following the regulator’s decision, Meta said that it “complies with privacy laws and regulations in Brazil,” and called the decision “a step backwards for innovation [and] competition in AI development and further delays bringing the benefits of AI to people in Brazil.”
The Brazilian government’s decision is a powerful, proactive move to protect people’s data privacy in the face of swiftly evolving uses and misuses of AI. Yesterday’s action especially helps to protect children from worrying that their personal data, shared with friends and family on Meta’s platforms, might be used to harm them in ways that are impossible to anticipate or guard against.
Dominican Republic’s Senate Doubles Down on Abortion Ban in Criminal Code
A deeply problematic bill for a new Criminal Code is now approaching final approval in the Dominican Republic's Senate. The bill, which the Senate approved on first review on June 26, maintains the country's complete ban on abortion. It also reduces penalties for sexual violence within marriage, classified as ‘non-consensual sexual activity,’ and continues to exclude sexual orientation from the list of characteristics protected from discrimination, thus failing to afford equal protection to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.
The Dominican Republic is one of only five countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that maintains a total prohibition on abortion and imposes incarceration for women and girls seeking abortions, as well as for those performing them. For decades, women's rights organizations have called for access to safe and legal abortion.
Local organizations have urged Congress to amend the penal code to legalize abortion under three circumstances: when the woman’s life is at risk, when the pregnancy is not viable, or in cases of rape or incest. They also call for amendments that protect LGBT people against discrimination and protect women and girls from all forms of violence, including sexual violence within marriage.
The criminalization of abortion is incompatible with the Dominican Republic's international human rights obligations. Denying girls, women, and other pregnant people’s access to abortion is a form of discrimination that jeopardizes human rights including to life; health; freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; nondiscrimination; privacy; and access to information. Human rights treaty bodies have consistently urged the Dominican Republic to decriminalize abortion entirely, or at minimum, to ensure safe and legal access when the health of the pregnant woman or girl is threatened and for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest or involving severe fetal impairment.
Decriminalizing abortion is an urgent public health and human rights imperative. Authorities should act swiftly to uphold the rights of women and girls by allowing them to make autonomous decisions about their lives.
A Path to Justice for Afghans
A United Nations meeting in Doha last weekend between Taliban officials and representatives from 22 countries faced widespread criticism as an attempt by governments to normalize relations with the Taliban. Rights activists expressed concern that these types of meetings could undermine the possibility of holding the Taliban accountable for serious human rights violations, including against women and girls.
Click to expand Image Former Defense Minister of Afghanistan, Asadullah Khalid. © US Department of State file photoAlleged crimes by former Afghan government officials and United States security force personnel have also not been subject to formal investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC). When opening the court’s probe in Afghanistan in 2021, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan announced he would focus on abuses committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State Khorasan Province armed group and deprioritize investigations into the former government and US forces, raising concerns about double standards in victims’ access to justice.
Last week, some 70 political figures from the former Afghan government met in Vienna to condemn the Doha meeting and call for an inclusive political process. However, they lost moral ground by including in their ranks individuals who themselves should be investigated for serious abuses. They include politicians like Mohammed Mohaqiq, whose militia forces were responsible for massacres and rapes in the early 2000s but who travels freely in Europe without fear of arrest. Also traveling the globe is former defense minister Asadullah Khalid, who has been implicated in the torture of detainees, extrajudicial killings, and rape. He has frequently visited the US and recently obtained a state of Dominica “golden passport.”
The Afghan human rights group Rawadari has called on states to use universal jurisdiction to bring Afghan leaders suspected of serious crimes, whether Taliban or former officials, to justice in countries where they live or travel. Under this legal principle, national courts can pursue cases for serious crimes regardless of where they were committed and the nationality of either perpetrator or victim. A few countries, notably the Netherlands, have done so against human rights abusers in the past.
But as many of those individuals continue to travel freely, more states should act and help break Afghanistan’s longstanding cycle of impunity for grave international crimes.
Artist Rearrested in Cameroon
Aboubacar Siddiki, known as Babadjo, was released from prison in Cameroon on June 21 after serving a three-month sentence for insulting a local governor. Moments after he stepped out of the prison he was rearrested on charges of disturbing public order, demonstration, and hate speech. Babadjo’s lawyer told Human Rights Watch that these charges are based on claims by the Cameroonian intelligence service that Babadjo’s supporters were planning to demonstrate to celebrate his release.
Babadjo, a member of the National Union for Democracy and Progress (Union nationale pour la démocratie et le progrès), was first arrested on March 8 at his home in the city of N'Gaoundéré, in the region of Adamawa, after he criticized the region’s governor on a WhatsApp group. His friends and local human rights defenders told Human Rights Watch that the governor ordered his arrest.
That wasn’t Babadjo’s first run-in with authorities. In 2020, he was arrested for a song he released that criticized local officials. He is currently detained at the gendarmerie headquarters in N'Gaoundéré. On June 24, his lawyer filed a habeas corpus petition before the high court, which is expected to rule on the case on July 4. Babadjo, his relatives and friends said, has diabetes and requires specialized medical care.
“This latest arrest of Babadjo exemplifies the government’s repression towards opposition and dissenting voices,” said Aboubakary Siddiki, president of another opposition party in northern Cameroon, Mouvement patriotique du salut camerounais. “The crackdown is increasing ahead of the 2025 vote as we see political meetings and political coalitions banned.”
Cameroonian authorities have cracked down on opposition and dissent for many years. In March, the territorial administration minister, Paul Atanga Nji, banned two opposition coalitions, the Political Alliance for Change (Alliance politique pour le changement), led by Jean-Michel Nintcheu, and the Political Alliance for Transition in Cameroon (Alliance politique pour la transition), led by Olivier Bile.
Cameroon’s president, Paul Biya, 91, in power since 1982, is serving his seventh term. He was last re-elected in 2018 after a contested vote-counting process which sparked a wave of political repression and a lethal crackdown on peaceful protests.
That Babadjo was rearrested as he left prison underscores how the Cameroonian authorities are silencing freedom of expression in the country. Authorities should release Babadjo, drop the charges against him, and ensure he has access to adequate health care while in detention.
Ethiopia: Army Attacks Health Care in Amhara Conflict
(Nairobi) – Ethiopian security forces have committed widespread attacks amounting to war crimes against medical professionals, patients, and health facilities in the country’s northwestern Amhara region, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
July 3, 2024 “If the Soldier Dies, It’s on You”The 66-page report, “‘If the Soldier Dies, It’s On You’: Attacks on Medical Care in Ethiopia’s Amhara Conflict,” documents how Ethiopian federal forces and a government-affiliated militia have attacked medical workers, healthcare facilities, and transports in at least 13 towns since the outbreak of fighting between Ethiopian federal forces and Amhara militia known as Fano in August 2023. Ethiopia’s international partners should call for accountability and an end to attacks on healthcare and should resume increased scrutiny of the rights situation in the country.
“Ethiopian federal forces operating with near impunity are unsurprisingly disregarding civilian lives by attacking medical facilities that are providing desperately needed care,” said Laetitia Bader, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “So long as the government feels no pressure to hold abusive forces to account, such atrocities are likely to continue.”
Between August 2023 and May 2024, Human Rights Watch interviewed remotely 58 victims and witnesses to abuses as well as medical professionals and aid workers. Human Rights Watch also reviewed satellite imagery and verified videos and photographs following an apparent government drone strike on an ambulance in November.
Human Rights Watch found that Ethiopian forces endangered or disrupted the functioning of hospitals. Soldiers beat, arbitrarily arrested, and intimidated medical professionals for providing care to the injured and sick, including alleged Fano fighters. The soldiers also unlawfully attacked ambulances and medical transports, interfered with access to humanitarian assistance, and denied the Amhara population the right to health.
In January, Ethiopian soldiers detained and interrogated a medical professional for several days in a military camp. “The colonel [interrogating me] called me a ‘Fano doctor,’” he said. “He started asking why I was giving treatment to the Fano. He said [the Fano] are not humans … they are monsters.”
Federal forces have obstructed access to medical facilities, including by wrongfully arresting patients on mere suspicion of a Fano affiliation, causing widespread fear for those that may seek or need treatment.
International humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war, prohibits attacks on civilians and civilian objects. In addition, it affords special protections to health facilities, medical professionals, patients, and ambulances. Even during an armed conflict, international human rights law remains in effect and contains core obligations for countries to maintain minimum essential levels of the right to health.
The fighting in Amhara has disrupted the delivery of medical supplies, leading to acute and prolonged shortages of essential medicines in hospitals and health centers, affecting their ability to provide adequate care.
Doctors and health staff have worked under dire and difficult conditions. “We have shortages of oxygen and medication, and since there is no power, we are struggling,” said one doctor working in a hospital in November 2023. “The blood bank has stopped collecting blood. ... Yesterday, we had to tell an expectant mother’s family to come with 20 liters or any amount of fuel they can bring so we can operate on them using the generator.”
Doctors seeking to replenish depleted hospital supplies have aroused the suspicion of government forces and in some cases have come under attack, affecting their ability to provide care to patients in a safe environment. On November 30, an apparent drone strike on a clearly marked ambulance in Wegel Tena town killed at least four civilians, badly wounded one, and destroyed much-needed medical supplies. “Psychologically, hospital staff are disturbed and living in fear of another attack,” a doctor said. “All the medications in the ambulance burned. We had used the little budget we had left to procure the medications.”
Humanitarian aid agencies working to fill gaps in medical supplies and equipment have also faced an increasingly difficult operating environment since August 2023. Their work has been affected by ongoing fighting, attacks on aid workers, towns frequently changing control, and movement restrictions, including difficulty moving to Fano-controlled areas. Nine aid workers have been killed in Amhara since the fighting started, at least four of them since January.
In March, Amhara regional health officials acknowledged that the ongoing conflict in the region between government forces and Fano militias have caused extensive damage to the healthcare system, though they claimed that “extremist forces” had pillaged 967 facilities and seized 124 ambulances.
Human Rights Watch wrote to Ethiopian authorities in June concerning the organization’s findings. The Ethiopian government has not responded.
Since the United Nations Human Rights Council failed to renew the UN-mandated inquiry on Ethiopia in October 2023, there has been limited international monitoring of the human rights situation in the country. Independent journalists have also had little access to the Amhara region. As part of its global mandate, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report on the human rights situation in Ethiopia on June 14, saying that Ethiopian federal forces and the Fano militia had been involved in numerous violations of international humanitarian law, resulting in over 2,000 civilian casualties in the Amhara region.
The Ethiopian government should immediately end attacks on medical professionals, patients, health facilities, and transports in the Amhara region. Ethiopian authorities should also work to strengthen the country’s legal framework to protect health care by passing specific legislation that protects healthcare workers, medical professionals, and health facilities.
International donors have acted to rehabilitate damaged health facilities in Amhara and other conflict-affected areas, but concerned governments have not publicly condemned attacks by Ethiopian federal forces nor urged the government to hold those responsible for abuses to account, Human Rights Watch said.
Ethiopia’s international partners, notably the African Union and the European Union, should press for resumed international scrutiny of the human rights situation in Ethiopia in multilateral forums. They should also increase support for health services in Amhara, ensure robust independent human rights monitoring in their agreements with the Ethiopian government, and publicly denounce restrictions on aid and attacks against aid workers.
“Foreign governments and international organizations have sought to return to ‘business as usual’ with the Ethiopian government despite the absence of normality on the ground,” Bader said. “Continued civilian suffering from the conflict in Amhara means much greater international scrutiny is needed in Ethiopia.”
UAE: Diplomatic Silence on Unfair Mass Trial
(Beirut) – Allies of the United Arab Emirates, including the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union member states, should break their silence on the unfair mass trial of at least 84 political dissidents and human rights defenders, Human Rights Watch said today. They should send observers to a session on July 10, 2024, at which a verdict is to be delivered.
In December 2023, while hosting the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), Emirati authorities brought charges against at least 84 defendants, the second largest trial in the UAE’s history, in retaliation for forming an independent advocacy group in 2010. The trial has been marred by myriad fair trial and due process violations, including allegations of ill-treatment that amount to torture, judges directing witness testimony, violations of the principle of double jeopardy, and hearings shrouded in secrecy.
“The US, UK, the EU, and other allies of the UAE should be standing up for the 84 brave Emiratis who are facing life sentences simply for expressing their political beliefs and defending human rights,” said Joey Shea, United Arab Emirates researcher at Human Rights Watch. “UAE allies should urge the immediate and unconditional release of these human rights defenders, meet with their families, send trial monitors, and publicly condemn the unfair trial.”
In a statement released January 6, Emirati authorities accused the 84 defendants of “establishing and managing a clandestine terrorist organization in the UAE known as the ‘Justice and Dignity Committee.’” The charges appear to come from the UAE’s abusive 2014 counterterrorism law, which sets out punishments of up to life in prison and even death for anyone who sets up, organizes, or runs such an organization. On May 10, the Emirates News Agency (WAM), the UAE’s official government news agency, announced that the verdict in the case would be released on July 10.
Human Rights Watch has urged governments to send monitors to observe the trial’s hearings, which the UAE claims are open to the public. No embassy in the UAE has sent such monitors to Human Rights Watch’s knowledge. Human Rights Watch has also requested that governments condemn due process violations and call for the immediate and unconditional release of the defendants. There have been no public statements from UAE allies calling for their release or expressing concern over the trial’s proceedings, though many of those same governments regularly claim that human rights are an important part of their foreign policy.
Many of the 84 defendants have been kept in incommunicado solitary confinement for at least a year and have reported abusive detention conditions, including physical assaults, lack of access to medical care and required medicines, incessant loud music, and forced nudity.
At least 60 of the defendants were already convicted in 2013 for their involvement with the Justice and Dignity Committee, according to the Emirates Detainees Advocacy Center (EDAC). This raises concerns that Emirati authorities are violating the principle of double jeopardy, which prohibits trying people twice for the same offense after they had received a final verdict.
While a January statement from WAM claimed the case is “public,” Emirati authorities have severely restricted access to the hearings, even for family members, and have kept secret basic details of the case, including the names of all the defendants.
Emirati authorities have prevented defendants’ lawyers from freely accessing case files and court documents. Lawyers have apparently not obtained physical or electronic copies of the court documents, relatives said, and are only able to view the documents on a screen in a secure room under the supervision of security officers. Informed sources said that the lawyers are not allowed to take photos of the documents and are only permitted to take handwritten notes.
“This is the second largest unfair mass trial of political dissidents and human rights defenders in the UAE’s history and the international community is failing to flag any concern,” Shea said. “Emirati authorities have long used their country’s economic and security relationships to prevent criticism of its rights record, but rarely, if ever, has the silence from its allies been so deafening.”
Vietnam: EU Should Better Address Intensifying Repression
(Brussels) – The European Union should reconsider its bilateral human rights dialogue with Vietnam and adopt more effective measures to address the Vietnamese government’s intensifying repression, Human Rights Watch said today, based on its submission to the EU. The next round of the EU-Vietnam Human Rights Dialogue will take place on July 4, 2024, in Brussels.
The EU and Vietnam have engaged in human rights discussions since the 1990s. Over the years, the Vietnamese government has made very little progress on numerous issues raised by EU officials, and in recent years its repression has considerably intensified.
“The EU’s human rights dialogues with Vietnam have had little impact on Hanoi’s repression,” said Claudio Francavilla, associate EU advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “More of the same won’t lead to different results. The EU needs a more effective approach to address Hanoi’s crackdown on basic freedoms.”
More than 160 people are currently imprisoned in Vietnam for criticizing the government, which is a criminal offense under the penal code. The authorities are increasingly targeting environmental activists, just as the EU and Vietnam have signed over €500 million (US$537 million) in agreements to support Vietnam’s transition to renewable energy. The Vietnamese Communist Party controls all media, and the government is the world’s third largest jailer of journalists. On June 1, the police arrested the prominent journalist Huy Duc and the lawyer Tran Dinh Trien for their pro-democracy posts on Facebook. Both were charged with “abusing the rights to democracy and freedom to infringe upon the interests of the State,” under article 331 of Vietnam’s penal code.
The authorities carry out intrusive surveillance of the internet, and posting or sharing criticism of the government online could lead to a long prison sentence.
Some of these abuses are linked to the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement, which entered into force in August 2020. Notably, the activists Mai Phan Loi and Dang Dinh Bach were arrested as they tried to join the Domestic Advisor Group (DAG), the entity tasked with monitoring implementation of the agreement. Mai Phan Loi was eventually released, in September 2023, but Dang Dinh Bach is still serving a five-year prison sentence. The activist Pham Chi Dung remains behind bars, serving a 15-year sentence for his peaceful advocacy in 2019 urging the EU to leverage Vietnam’s appetite for trade deals to secure human rights progress in the country; a call that Human Rights Watch and many other rights groups supported.
Vietnam has not ratified International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention No. 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize, despite a specific pledge to do so by 2023, made ahead of the European Parliament’s February 2020 vote on the trade agreement.
These and other developments, recently acknowledged by all EU member states, members of the European Parliament, and European members of the Domestic Advisory Group, run counter to Vietnam’s pledges, including those undertaken in the EU trade deal. The European Commission stated that the deal “includes an institutional and legal link to the EU-Vietnam Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, allowing appropriate action in the case of serious breaches of human rights,” but no action has been taken. Some nongovernmental organizations have urged the suspension of the deal over labor abuse complaints.
The EU should not repeat fruitless human right dialogues that merely cultivate the illusion of addressing Vietnam’s human rights crackdown, Human Rights Watch said. The EU should consider more effective tools to press Vietnamese authorities to halt their abuses. In particular, the EU should review Vietnam’s compliance with its human rights commitments under the bilateral political and trade deals, and lay out the consequences for persistent failure to comply. Furthermore, the EU should consider adopting targeted sanctions against those responsible for systemic human rights abuses in the country, including Vietnam’s leadership, and take the lead in international forums to secure independent monitoring and reporting on Vietnam’s human rights record.
“Only targeted sanctions and concrete consequences for political and trade relations will flag to Hanoi that the EU is serious about human rights,” Francavilla said. “Unless the human rights dialogue is used to lay out those consequences, and benchmarks to avoid them, it will remain just another box-ticking exercise.”
Cambodia: Smear Campaign against Labor Group
(Bangkok) – Cambodian government-aligned unions are harassing and threatening legal action against the labor rights organization Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights (CENTRAL) and its leadership following the group’s report on freedom of association violations in Cambodia, Human Rights Watch said today. The report was released with partners from Better Factories Cambodia (BFC), part of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Better Work program, which operates in 13 countries, including Cambodia.
The ILO and global brands and retail partners who engage with BFC, including Adidas, C&A, Gap Inc., H&M, Inditex, and Nike, should urge the Cambodian authorities to cease efforts to intimidate or censor CENTRAL and its leadership and engage with the report’s recommendations to improve the program.
“The smearing and judicial harassment of CENTRAL for their work on freedom of association for workers and unions threatens not just labor rights but all critical reporting by civil society in Cambodia,” said Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The ILO, Better Factories Cambodia, and the brands who rely on their reporting should condemn efforts to hinder their work.”
CENTRAL’s report, “Barriers to Representation: Freedom of Association in Cambodia - an assessment of Better Factories Cambodia’s FOA compliance monitoring,” released on June 4, 2024, includes findings from a series of focus group discussions with 78 union representatives from 24-factory level unions in 22 factories in December 2022. These discussions were held with union representatives affiliated with the Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions and the Coalition of Cambodia Apparel Worker Democratic Unions. In June 2023, the researchers also carried out a small-scale survey with local union representatives from 14 factories registered with the ILO-BFC program.
The report provides important “shadow data” and documents obstructions to freedom of association, including verbal intimidation, threats, harassment, and blacklisting, which it says have “severely” affected independent unions’ ability to function. It also includes workers’ knowledge about BFC compliance data, including the digital literacy of factory-level union representatives and workers, their ability to find the monitoring program’s summary findings online, the inability of unions to purchase the program’s full findings (priced at US$1,500 per report), and the barriers independent unions experience in engaging constructively in factory-level Performance Improvement Consultative Committees.
CENTRAL makes concrete recommendations regarding the ways the ILO-BFC could improve its program, including through more robust disclosures, making its full reports available to workers, and introducing a specialized grievance-redress mechanism for ILO-BFC factories on inaccurate monitoring data. Such measures are important to ensure constructive dialogue to better protect workers’ freedom of association and improve the ILO-BFC program, including its Transparency Database, which reports information about a range of compliance issues, including freedom of association.
BFC is a joint program of the International Finance Corporation, a World Bank Group institution that promotes the private sector in developing countries, and the ILO. Publicly available documents from this year’s International Labour Conference, which took place between June 3-14 in Geneva, indicate that the ILO is concerned about severe problems workers and trade unions face in Cambodia, including “serious violations of basic civil liberties essential to the exercise of freedom of association … violence, intimidation, arrest and imprisonment of trade unionists for carrying peaceful industrial action.”
Following publication of the report, many unions widely considered to be government-aligned have initiated an apparently coordinated effort to urge Cambodia’s Interior Ministry to investigate CENTRAL’s operations and finances, participating in protests on June 14 and June 20 outside CENTRAL’s office. They accused CENTRAL of “damaging the country’s international reputation” and “impacting the national economy and the welfare of workers, purportedly at the behest of foreign donors.”
Three government-aligned unions have also filed unwarranted complaints with the Interior Ministry, requesting investigations of CENTRAL and its leadership.
On June 27, the government-aligned Cambodian Confederation of Workers Rights Protection Unions, filed a complaint at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court, the first of three complaints directed at CENTRAL. It alleged that CENTRAL’s program manager, Tharo Khun had publicly defamed it and accused him of incitement to discrimination, a crime that carries a one to three-year prison sentence. The complaint against Tharo’s alleged comments do not fit the definition of incitement to discriminate under article 496 of Cambodia’s criminal code. Cambodia’s incitement law is problematic and has been found by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to be inconsistent with international human rights standards. During a 2022 UN Human Rights Committee dialogue, a committee expert also expressed concern at the number of people who had been imprisoned under the criminal code provisions on incitement, insult, and defamation in the past five years.
On June 27, 44 civil society and community groups issued a joint statement against the Interior Ministry’s decision to investigate CENTRAL as a “clear reprisal and an attempt to intimidate an NGO [nongovernmental organization] that is committed to improving the freedom of association for all Cambodian workers and unions.” The statement also calls on the ILO, the International Finance Corporation, and BFC “to publicly acknowledge the value of critical research in improving its programmes’ operation and implementation.”
On June 28, Interior Minister Sar Sokha issued a letter to the executive director of CENTRAL, Moeun Tola, demanding information about all its bank accounts in Cambodia within 30 days. This action foreshadows an arbitrary investigation into CENTRAL’s activities and its compliance with its bylaws under Cambodia’s highly criticized Law on Associations and NGOs. The consequences for CENTRAL could be dire, potentially leading to its registration being revoked, Human Rights Watch said.
On June 30, the government-aligned National Labour Confederation of Cambodia also submitted the second of three complaints in the form of a petition to the Interior Minister, urging an expedited investigation and legal action against CENTRAL and reportedly stating that if CENTRAL fails to retract its report as “demanded by numerous union leaders,” the confederation would consider taking legal action against it.
On July 2, a government-aligned union, National Trade Union Coalition submitted the third of three complaints to the Ministry of Interior, demanding the ministry investigate CENTRAL’s June 4 report and the organization’s activities and alleging that the report lacked clear sources and evidence, was not scientifically researched, and defamed the freedom of trade unions in Cambodia.
CENTRAL have previously faced direct and indirect threats in the past but this particular smear campaign is unique in that it appears to be a coordinated attack to force them to change their reporting or risk facing legal action or being shut down.
In May 2024, a number of UN member states also made recommendations at the UN Human Rights Council, calling on Cambodia to ensure an enabling environment for civil society, labor groups, and freedom of association, including the improvement of working conditions and labor standards.
“Cambodia’s Ministry of Interior should make clear that reporting on freedom of association is not an illegal activity and is no basis for punitive investigations into the operations of labor rights organizations,” Lau said. “Governments, embassies, and global brands invested in Cambodia’s garment, footwear, and travel goods sector should speak out against government harassment of CENTRAL and promote freedom of association, independent labor advocacy, and the security of rights defenders in Cambodia.”
Central African Republic: Step Toward Accountability
(Bangui) – The Special Criminal Court (SCC) in the Central African Republic has announced that on June 16, 2024, it arrested a former anti-balaka leader, Edmond Beïna, for crimes committed in 2014, Human Rights Watch said today. The arrest is a step toward assuring justice for victims of serious crimes in the country.
The court confirmed the arrest on June 21. The court charged Beïna with crimes against humanity and war crimes allegedly committed in Guen, Gadzi, and Djomo, in the Mambéré-Kadéï province in the southwestern part of the country, in February and March 2014. Anti-balaka groups under the command of Beïna and a fellow armed group leader, Matruin Kombo, attacked civilians, killing at least 72 Muslim men and boys, some as young as 9, in attacks on February 1 and 5, 2014. The court arrested Kombo in November 2022. In addition to Kombo and Beïna, three other co-accused are detained by the court, charged with crimes arising out of the same facts.
“To date, there has been no accountability for the horrendous crimes committed in Guen, and impunity continues in the Central African Republic,” said Lewis Mudge, Central Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The Special Criminal Court can change that narrative and finally deliver some justice to victims and their families who have been waiting for so long.”
The SCC was established to investigate and prosecute serious international crimes committed in the Central African Republic since 2003. It is based in Bangui, the capital and is staffed by national and international judges and personnel. It began its operations in 2018.
The anti-balaka militias rose up across the country to fight the Seleka, a predominantly Muslim coalition that took control of Bangui on March 24, 2013. The anti-balaka quickly began to target Muslim civilians, particularly in the west, equating them with Seleka or the coalition’s sympathizers.
Click to expand Image Wounds of a victim of the February 1, 2014 anti-balaka attack on Guen. © 2014 Lewis Mudge/Human Rights WatchIn March 2014, a Human Rights Watch researcher spent several days in the country, speaking with survivors of the Guen and Djomo attacks. The victims, all Muslims and mostly elderly women and children, had sought refuge at a Catholic parish, where they were attacked.
The father of 10-year-old Oumarou Bouba said:
“I took my son when the anti-balaka attacked. As we were running away, he was shot by the anti-balaka. He was shot in the right leg and he fell down, but they finished him off with a machete. I had no choice but to run on. I had been shot too. I later went to see his body and he had been struck in his head and in the neck.”
On February 5, after looting Guen’s Muslim neighborhoods, the anti-balaka attacked a property where hundreds of Muslims had sought refuge. In this attack, the anti-balaka divided approximately 45 men into two groups, led them out of the compound, forced them to lie on the ground, and executed them.
Witnesses said that on March 6, the anti-balaka, under the command of Beïna and Kombo, went to the parish searching for the local imam from Djomo, Abdoulaye Liman, who had sought refuge at the parish, and killed him.
The Guen massacre demonstrated the utter lawlessness of the anti-balaka, the urgent need at the time for peacekeepers to act quickly to protect civilians, and the importance now—10 years on—to enforce the rule of law and deliver justice, Human Rights Watch said.
Beïna’s arrest comes as the SCC has made progress on some important cases. In October 2022, the court convicted three members of the 3R rebel group for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in May 2019 in the northwestern part of the country. The conviction was confirmed on appeal in July 2023.
The court’s second trial started in December 2023 and is ongoing. It relates to alleged crimes committed by factions of the Popular Front for the Renaissance of the Central African Republic (Front populaire pour la renaissance de la Centrafrique, FPRC), an armed group, in 2020 in the town of Ndele. Another trial for crimes allegedly committed by the group in Ndele in 2020 started in June 2024. In September 2023, the SCC also announced charges against Abdoulaye Hissène, an FPRC leader, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in 2017; he remains in pretrial detention.
At the same time, the SCC continues to face challenges, including arresting some suspects. In May, the court issued an arrest warrant for former president François Bozizé, who is charged with crimes against humanity allegedly committed between February 2009 and March 23, 2013, by the Presidential Guard and other security services at a military training center north of Bangui. Bozizé, who returned to the country in 2019 as it was wracked with conflict and later emerged as a key leader in a rebel coalition, is currently hiding in Guinea-Bissau.
The current minister of livestock and animal health, Hassan Bouba, was arrested on November 19, 2022, on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges. He was escorted out of detention by national gendarmes in defiance of court orders on November 26, 2022, and failed to appear before the court.
While the security situation in the country has improved over the past decade, impunity for those responsible for serious crimes continues to fuel recurring cycles of violence, and armed groups continue to commit atrocities, leaving trails of death, displacement, and destitution.
The SCC plays an important role in ensuring justice for attacks on civilians over the past decade, like those at Guen or on camps for the internally displaced. The government and the court’s international partners should step up their efforts to support the court to ensure that it can effectively deliver on its crucial mandate, including through adequate resources and the prompt execution of pending arrest warrants, Human Rights Watch said.
“If adequately supported, the Special Criminal Court holds the promise of delivering justice for victims of the most serious crimes,” Mudge said. “Beïna’s arrest and charging show that justice, no matter how long it takes, will be served, and this is a clear warning to others who continue to commit atrocities in the Central African Republic.”
Australia: Children’s Personal Photos Misused to Power AI Tools
(Sydney) – Personal photos of Australian children are being used to create powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools without the knowledge or consent of the children or their families, Human Rights Watch said today. These photos are scraped off the web into a large data set that companies then use to train their AI tools. In turn, others use these tools to create malicious deepfakes that put even more children at risk of exploitation and harm.
“Children should not have to live in fear that their photos might be stolen and weaponized against them,” said Hye Jung Han, children’s rights and technology researcher and advocate at Human Rights Watch. “The Australian government should urgently adopt laws to protect children’s data from AI-fueled misuse.”
Analysis by Human Rights Watch found that LAION-5B, a data set used to train popular AI tools and built by scraping most of the internet, contains links to identifiable photos of Australian children. Some children’s names are listed in the accompanying caption or the URL where the image is stored. In many cases, their identities are easily traceable, including information on when and where the child was at the time their photo was taken.
One such photo features two boys, ages 3 and 4, grinning from ear to ear as they hold paintbrushes in front of a colorful mural. The accompanying caption reveals both children’s full names and ages, and the name of the preschool they attend in Perth, in Western Australia. Information about these children does not appear to exist anywhere else on the internet.
Human Rights Watch found 190 photos of children from all of Australia’s states and territories. This is likely to be a significant undercount of the amount of children’s personal data in LAION-5B, as Human Rights Watch reviewed fewer than 0.0001 percent of the 5.85 billion images and captions contained in the data set.
The photos Human Rights Watch reviewed span the entirety of childhood. They capture intimate moments of babies being born into the gloved hands of doctors and still connected to their mother through their umbilical cord; young children blowing bubbles or playing instruments in preschools; children dressed as their favorite characters for Book Week; and girls in swimsuits at their school swimming carnival.
The photos also capture First Nations children, including those identified in captions as being from the Anangu, Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara, Pintupi, Tiwi, and Warlpiri peoples. These photos include toddlers dancing to a song in their Indigenous language; a girl proudly holding a sand goanna lizard by its tail; and three young boys with traditional body paint and their arms around each other.
Many of these photos were originally seen by few people and previously had a measure of privacy. They do not appear to be possible to find through an online search. Some photos were posted by children or their family on personal blogs and photo- and video-sharing sites. Other photos were uploaded by schools, or by photographers hired by families to capture personal moments and portraits. Some of these photos are not possible to find on the publicly accessible versions of these websites. Some were uploaded years or even a decade before LAION-5B was created.
Human Rights Watch found that LAION-5B also contained photos from sources that had taken steps to protect children’s privacy. One such photo is a close-up of two boys making funny faces, captured from a video posted on YouTube of teenagers celebrating Schoolies week after their final exams. The video’s creator took precautions to protect the privacy of those featured in the video: Its privacy settings are set to “unlisted,” and the video does not show up in YouTube’s search results.
YouTube’s terms of service prohibit scraping or harvesting information that might identify a person, including images of their faces, except under certain circumstances; this instance appears to violate these policies. YouTube did not respond to our request for comment.
Once their data is swept up and fed into AI systems, these children face further threats to their privacy due to flaws in the technology. AI models, including those trained on LAION-5B, are notorious for leaking private information; they can reproduce identical copies of the material they were trained on, including medical records and photos of real people. Guardrails set by some companies to prevent the leakage of sensitive data have been repeatedly broken.
Moreover, current AI models cannot forget data they were trained on, even if the data was later removed from the training data set. This perpetuity risks harming Indigenous Australians in particular, as many First Nations peoples restrict the reproduction of photos of deceased people during periods of mourning.
These privacy risks pave the way for further harm, Human Rights Watch said. Training on photos of real children enables AI models to create convincing clones of any child, based on a handful of photos or even a single image. Malicious actors have used LAION-trained AI tools to generate explicit imagery of children using innocuous photos, as well as explicit imagery of child survivors whose images of sexual abuse were scraped into LAION-5B.
Likewise, the presence of Australian children in LAION-5B contributes to the ability of AI models trained on this data set to produce realistic imagery of Australian children. This substantially amplifies the existing risk children face that someone will steal their likeness from photos or videos of themselves posted online and use AI to manipulate them into saying or doing things that they never said nor did.
In June 2024, about 50 girls from Melbourne reported that photos from their social media profiles were taken and manipulated using AI to create sexually explicit deepfakes of them, which were then circulated online.
Fabricated media have always existed, but required time, resources, and expertise to create, and were largely unrealistic. Current AI tools create lifelike outputs in seconds, are often free, and are easy to use, risking the proliferation of nonconsensual deepfakes that could recirculate online forever and inflict lasting harm.
LAION, the German nonprofit organization that manages LAION-5B, confirmed on June 1 that the data set contained the children’s personal photos found by Human Rights Watch, and pledged to remove them. It disputed that AI models trained on LAION-5B could reproduce personal data verbatim. LAION said, “We urge the HRW to reach out to the individuals or their guardians to encourage removing the content from public domains, which will help prevent its recirculation.”
Mark Dreyfus, Australia’s attorney general, recently introduced a bill in parliament banning the nonconsensual creation or sharing of sexually explicit deepfakes of adults, noting that such imagery of children would continue to be treated as child abuse material under the Criminal Code. However, Human Rights Watch said that this approach misses the deeper problem that children’s personal data remains unprotected from misuse, including the nonconsensual manipulation of real children’s likenesses into any kind of deepfake.
In August, Australia’s government is set to introduce reforms to the Privacy Act, including drafting Australia’s first child data protection law, known as the Children’s Online Privacy Code. This Code should protect the best interests of the child, as recognized in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and their full range of rights in the collection, processing, use, and retention of children’s personal data, Human Rights Watch said.
The Children’s Online Privacy Code should prohibit scraping children’s personal data into AI systems. It should also prohibit the nonconsensual digital replication or manipulation of children’s likenesses. And it should provide children who experience harm with mechanisms to seek meaningful justice and remedy.
Australia’s government should also ensure that any proposed AI regulations incorporate data privacy protections for everyone, and especially for children.
“Generative AI is still a nascent technology, and the associated harm that children are already experiencing is not inevitable,” Han said. “Protecting children’s data privacy now will help to shape the development of this technology into one that promotes, rather than violates, children’s rights.”
Australia: Children’s Personal Photos Misused to Power AI Tools
(Sydney) – Personal photos of Australian children are being used to create powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools without the knowledge or consent of the children or their families, Human Rights Watch said today. These photos are scraped off the web into a large data set that companies then use to train their AI tools. In turn, others use these tools to create malicious deepfakes that put even more children at risk of exploitation and harm.
“Children should not have to live in fear that their photos might be stolen and weaponized against them,” said Hye Jung Han, children’s rights and technology researcher and advocate at Human Rights Watch. “The Australian government should urgently adopt laws to protect children’s data from AI-fueled misuse.”
Analysis by Human Rights Watch found that LAION-5B, a data set used to train popular AI tools and built by scraping most of the internet, contains links to identifiable photos of Australian children. Some children’s names are listed in the accompanying caption or the URL where the image is stored. In many cases, their identities are easily traceable, including information on when and where the child was at the time their photo was taken.
One such photo features two boys, ages 3 and 4, grinning from ear to ear as they hold paintbrushes in front of a colorful mural. The accompanying caption reveals both children’s full names and ages, and the name of the preschool they attend in Perth, in Western Australia. Information about these children does not appear to exist anywhere else on the internet.
Human Rights Watch found 190 photos of children from all of Australia’s states and territories. This is likely to be a significant undercount of the amount of children’s personal data in LAION-5B, as Human Rights Watch reviewed fewer than 0.0001 percent of the 5.85 billion images and captions contained in the data set.
The photos Human Rights Watch reviewed span the entirety of childhood. They capture intimate moments of babies being born into the gloved hands of doctors and still connected to their mother through their umbilical cord; young children blowing bubbles or playing instruments in preschools; children dressed as their favorite characters for Book Week; and girls in swimsuits at their school swimming carnival.
The photos also capture First Nations children, including those identified in captions as being from the Anangu, Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara, Pintupi, Tiwi, and Warlpiri peoples. These photos include toddlers dancing to a song in their Indigenous language; a girl proudly holding a sand goanna lizard by its tail; and three young boys with traditional body paint and their arms around each other.
Many of these photos were originally seen by few people and previously had a measure of privacy. They do not appear to be possible to find through an online search. Some photos were posted by children or their family on personal blogs and photo- and video-sharing sites. Other photos were uploaded by schools, or by photographers hired by families to capture personal moments and portraits. Some of these photos are not possible to find on the publicly accessible versions of these websites. Some were uploaded years or even a decade before LAION-5B was created.
Human Rights Watch found that LAION-5B also contained photos from sources that had taken steps to protect children’s privacy. One such photo is a close-up of two boys making funny faces, captured from a video posted on YouTube of teenagers celebrating Schoolies week after their final exams. The video’s creator took precautions to protect the privacy of those featured in the video: Its privacy settings are set to “unlisted,” and the video does not show up in YouTube’s search results.
YouTube’s terms of service prohibit scraping or harvesting information that might identify a person, including images of their faces, except under certain circumstances; this instance appears to violate these policies. YouTube did not respond to our request for comment.
Once their data is swept up and fed into AI systems, these children face further threats to their privacy due to flaws in the technology. AI models, including those trained on LAION-5B, are notorious for leaking private information; they can reproduce identical copies of the material they were trained on, including medical records and photos of real people. Guardrails set by some companies to prevent the leakage of sensitive data have been repeatedly broken.
Moreover, current AI models cannot forget data they were trained on, even if the data was later removed from the training data set. This perpetuity risks harming Indigenous Australians in particular, as many First Nations peoples restrict the reproduction of photos of deceased people during periods of mourning.
These privacy risks pave the way for further harm, Human Rights Watch said. Training on photos of real children enables AI models to create convincing clones of any child, based on a handful of photos or even a single image. Malicious actors have used LAION-trained AI tools to generate explicit imagery of children using innocuous photos, as well as explicit imagery of child survivors whose images of sexual abuse were scraped into LAION-5B.
Likewise, the presence of Australian children in LAION-5B contributes to the ability of AI models trained on this data set to produce realistic imagery of Australian children. This substantially amplifies the existing risk children face that someone will steal their likeness from photos or videos of themselves posted online and use AI to manipulate them into saying or doing things that they never said nor did.
In June 2024, about 50 girls from Melbourne reported that photos from their social media profiles were taken and manipulated using AI to create sexually explicit deepfakes of them, which were then circulated online.
Fabricated media have always existed, but required time, resources, and expertise to create, and were largely unrealistic. Current AI tools create lifelike outputs in seconds, are often free, and are easy to use, risking the proliferation of nonconsensual deepfakes that could recirculate online forever and inflict lasting harm.
LAION, the German nonprofit organization that manages LAION-5B, confirmed on June 1 that the data set contained the children’s personal photos found by Human Rights Watch, and pledged to remove them. It disputed that AI models trained on LAION-5B could reproduce personal data verbatim. LAION also said that children and their guardians were responsible for removing children’s personal photos from the internet, which it contended was the most effective protection against misuse.
Mark Dreyfus, Australia’s attorney general, recently introduced a bill in parliament banning the nonconsensual creation or sharing of sexually explicit deepfakes of adults, noting that such imagery of children would continue to be treated as child abuse material under the Criminal Code. However, Human Rights Watch said that this approach misses the deeper problem that children’s personal data remains unprotected from misuse, including the nonconsensual manipulation of real children’s likenesses into any kind of deepfake.
In August, Australia’s government is set to introduce reforms to the Privacy Act, including drafting Australia’s first child data protection law, known as the Children’s Online Privacy Code. This Code should protect the best interests of the child, as recognized in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and their full range of rights in the collection, processing, use, and retention of children’s personal data, Human Rights Watch said.
The Children’s Online Privacy Code should prohibit scraping children’s personal data into AI systems. It should also prohibit the nonconsensual digital replication or manipulation of children’s likenesses. And it should provide children who experience harm with mechanisms to seek meaningful justice and remedy.
Australia’s government should also ensure that any proposed AI regulations incorporate data privacy protections for everyone, and especially for children.
“Generative AI is still a nascent technology, and the associated harm that children are already experiencing is not inevitable,” Han said. “Protecting children’s data privacy now will help to shape the development of this technology into one that promotes, rather than violates, children’s rights.”
US Should Expand Refugee Definition
Representatives from Latin American and Caribbean states convened recently to address responses to “forced displacement due to disasters,” including the effects of the climate crisis, following up on their Cartagena Declaration of 1984. The United States has not adopted the declaration and did not join the group, but it should pay attention and reflect on its own policies, as some people in need of protection – particularly from the Americas –will seek to move to the US.
Often, the people most impacted by extreme weather events, including those intensified by climate change, live in locations least responsible for the climate crisis. Extreme weather caused over half of new displacement in 2023 globally, with 26.4 million people displaced by extreme weather events, including floods and droughts.
As the climate crisis worsens, the US has paradoxically worked to restrict asylum access and narrow the qualifying grounds of protection.
Since 2020, Human Rights Watch has maintained that the increasing effects of the climate crisis necessitate broadening international protection and incorporating complementary protection. The threat of injury and death from climate change, disproportionally impacting already at-risk communities, can result in similar physical harm and endangerment as other grounds for protection.
In December 2023, the International Refugee Assistance Project, Refugees International, and others filed a brief in ongoing litigation in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights regarding state obligations to people displaced in climate contexts. The organizations argue that states are obligated to protect populations before and after displacement occurs.
Though the US is not bound by Inter-American Court rulings, the court’s imminent advisory ruling on the impacts of climate change on human rights will offer guidance on rights-based approaches to a growing threat.
The US should expand protection for people displaced in the context of climate-related events and adopt the broader refugee definition in the Cartagena Declaration to include people fleeing circumstances seriously disturbing public order, including extreme weather events intensified by the climate crisis.
The US should also respect the principle of nonrefoulement for people whose lives would be threatened if returned to their country of origin because of exceptional situations like the effects of climate crisis. The US Congress should amend US asylum law to extend protection to people who face real risk of serious harm to life or physical integrity in such circumstances, even if the perpetrator or cause of that harm is not seeking to persecute them.
Additionally, the US should combat the root causes of climate change by equitably transitioning from fossil fuels.
Cambodia: Environmental Activists Sentenced to 6 to 8 Years
On Tuesday, the Phnom Penh Capital Court handed down a guilty verdict in the criminal trial of 10 activists from Mother Nature, an award-winning, youth-led Cambodian environmental group, on charges that stem from the group’s peaceful environmental activism from 2012 to 2021. At least four of the activists were immediately arrested outside the courtroom, where they were sitting with supporters and calling for a more just court system that defends environmental rights.
The group’s successful campaigns include stopping the Chinese-led construction of a hydroelectric dam threatening an Indigenous community and helping end the largely corrupted business of sand export from the coastal estuaries of Koh Kong, which was destroying the local ecosystem and fishing grounds.
The verdict is devastating for the 10 activists, who face between six to eight years in prison for their efforts to protect Cambodia’s environment. It also sends an appalling message to Cambodia’s youth that the government will side with special interests over the environment every chance it gets.
Arrest warrants were issued for all 10 activists, who were charged under Article 453 of the Criminal Code for plotting against the state. Ly Chandaravuth, Thun Ratha, Long Kunthea, Phuon Keoraksmey, Binh Piseth, Pok Khoeuy, and Rai Raksa were sentenced to 6 years in prison under Article 453.
Sun Rotha, Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson, and Yim Leanghy were sentenced to 8 years in prison and a 10 million riel fine on plotting against the state and insulting the king under Articles 453 and 437, respectively.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, like his father, former Prime Minister Hun Sen, has repeatedly ignored calls by United Nations experts to address the closing space for civil society and human rights defenders. Development partners and others who invest in a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment for Cambodia should call on the government to quash these verdicts and support genuine freedom of expression and association.
Four of those convicted — Chandaravuth, Ratha, Keoraksmey, and Kunthea — attended the hearings and were immediately arrested by uniformed and plainclothes personnel following the verdict. A fifth Mother Nature activist convicted, Leanghy, also attended previous hearings but was not present during the arrests this morning.
Gonzalez-Davidson, a Spanish national and Mother Nature’s founder, was not present at the hearings after being banned from entering the country. Four others who were also charged — Ratha, Piseth, Raksa, and Khoeuy — did not appear in court or attend the hearings.
The prosecution and defense completed their closing arguments on June 24 after holding five hearings on the case, one of which was boycotted by the five defendants appearing because the court restricted access to the trial for their supporters and family.
UN Should Ensure Continued Scrutiny of Rights Crisis in Eritrea
“Patterns of gross human rights violations, including the widespread use of arbitrary and incommunicado detention and enforced disappearance persist unabated” in Eritrea, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea, Dr. Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker, told the UN Human Rights Council.
Despite consistent concerns being raised about the dire rights situation across the country, he reported there had been “no indications of any measures taken to improve” it.
This assessment, detailed in the report he presented during the council’s 56th session, was sadly unsurprising, given Eritrea’s track record of refusing to cooperate or engage with international and regional human rights mechanisms, despite its membership of the UN Human Rights Council.
Eritrea remains one of the only countries in the world to have never accepted a visit by a UN independent human rights expert, and the country has consistently ignored recommendations made by UN experts. It has also ignored repeated calls by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights over the last two decades, including to release detainees and to guarantee the rights to a fair trial, freedom of opinion and expression, religious freedoms, and peaceful assembly.
Despite consistent appeals from the UN, the African Commission and civil society, the Government has maintained a policy of indefinite national service, including compulsory military conscription, and has failed to stop abuses against conscripts, including children.
Civic space within Eritrea is completely closed: no independent media, independent civil society organizations, or political opposition parties are able to operate within the country, resulting in little to no checks on the executive. Impunity remains the norm and due process rights are systematically flouted. Given this context, international engagement and support for Eritrean human rights defenders is all the more important.
In the face of Eritrea’s flagrant and persistent violations, total disregard for human rights mechanisms, and erasure of domestic civic space, the work of the Special Rapporteur shines a much-needed spotlight on the situation in Eritrea, and much-needed support to beleaguered Eritrean civil society.
Countries with a vote at the UN Human Rights Council should respond positively to civil society appeals to support a resolution renewing his mandate when it is presented next week, despite moves by Russia, Iran and other rights-abusing Governments to counter the initiative. They should stand with victims of abuses and the courageous Eritrean human rights defenders, not with rights-abusing governments seeking to undermine international protections.
South Sudan’s Authorities Show Their Aversion to Criticism Yet Again
Last week, authorities in Jonglei state detained a photojournalist with the state-run South Sudan Broadcasting Corporation for participating in protests about the cost of living and nonpayment of civil servant salaries. Media reported that police and National Security Service (NSS) agents took Aleu Anyieth from his home in Bor, the capital of Jonglei state, but his whereabouts, five days later, remain unknown, raising the possibility that he has been forcibly disappeared. Credible sources say he is accused of organizing the protests.
Bol Deng Bol, a human rights defender who heads the Jonglei Civil Society Network and Intrepid South Sudan, a human rights organization, announced on the social media site X that he is wanted by the authorities in connection with the same protests. He told Human Rights Watch that he had received repeated threats, including that his office would be shut down, by people he believes to be NSS.
Neither Anyieth nor Bol, nor any other peaceful protestor, should face harassment or sanctions for participating in or allegedly organizing protests. Anyieth’s whereabouts should immediately be made public and he should be released.
These recent developments are indicative of the heavy-handed approach used by the government to quash dissent. Since the start of 2024, Human Rights Watch has documented an increase in arbitrary arrests and detentions of critics. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan noted in late 2023 that repression was deeply entrenched in South Sudan and that it had stagnated any democratic prospects.
Citizens have a right to protest and to demand that their government addresses economic hardship, corruption, and increasing inequality in South Sudan. Many security forces, civil servants, and members of parliament have not been paid since September 2023. The war in neighboring Sudan has exacerbated an already dire humanitarian situation, with the UN saying 7 million people in South Sudan are facing hunger. The war has also overstretched South Sudan’s capacity to respond to a growing refugee crisis and jeopardized its economy, which relies on Sudan’s infrastructure to transport its oil to international markets.
South Sudan’s government should allow and encourage a national conversation about the socioeconomic realities and outline plans to tackle the harm those realities create for people. What it shouldn’t be doing is silencing those calling for solutions, transparency, and equity.
Using AI to Fight Trafficking Is Dangerous
The US State Department has released its annual Trafficking in Persons (TIPs) Report ranking nearly 200 countries’ anti-trafficking efforts.
The report finds perpetrators increasingly use “social media, online advertisements, websites, dating apps, and gaming platforms” to force, defraud, or coerce job seekers into labor and sexual exploitation, and encourages technology companies to use “data and algorithm tools to detect human trafficking patterns, identify suspicious and illicit activity, and report” these to law enforcement.
Sweeping calls to collect data on marginalized populations and automate decisions about what constitutes a human trafficking pattern are dangerous. Women of color, migrants, and queer people face profiling and persecution under surveillance regimes that fail to distinguish between consensual adult sex work and human trafficking.
The TIPs report says artificial intelligence (AI) language models, can “detect, translate, and categorize key words used by traffickers to identify trafficking communication patterns.” Unfortunately, language models are likely to be built on discriminatory stereotypes which have plagued anti-trafficking efforts for decades.
A Department of Homeland Security campaign, for example, instructs hotels to train housekeeping staff to report “signs of human trafficking” based on indicators that conflate sex work with trafficking. Victims allegedly request “additional towels,” “wait at a table or bar to be picked up,” “dress inappropriately,” “rent rooms by the hour,” and collect cash “left on tables.” Such tropes cause disproportionate surveillance of poor, racialized, and transgender sex workers, and inaccurately categorize standard safety tactics - public first meetings, hygiene, avoiding traceable payments - as trafficking indicators.
Studies show that digital tools and policies which take an similarly broad approach to collecting evidence of alleged exploitation online are dangerous and counterproductive. A 2024 report found platforms are “incentivized to overreport” potential child sexual abuse material (CSAM), leaving law enforcement “overwhelmed by the high volume” and unable to identify perpetrators. A 2022 study into technology which scraped and analyzed advertisements for sexual services found “misalignment between developers, users of the platform, and sex industry workers they are attempting to assist,” concluding that these approaches are “ineffective” and “exacerbate harm.”
Trafficking survivors, meanwhile, have warned that “trafficking data is both limited and notoriously inaccurate [and] bad data means bad learning.” Outsourcing to an algorithm the detection and reporting of “suspicious and illicit activity” is a recipe for perpetuating violence and discrimination against already marginalized people.
UN Human Rights Council: Beirut Blast Inquiry Needed
(Beirut) – The United Nations Human Rights Council should establish an international fact-finding mission into the August 4, 2020 blast at Beirut’s port, 18 organizations including Human Rights Watch, and dozens of relatives of the victims of the blast said in a statement released today.
Nearly four years after the blast, nobody has been held to account, and the Lebanese authorities have continuously obstructed the investigation, leading to its suspension in December 2021.
“While other countries have condemned the Lebanese authorities’ continuous interference into the domestic investigation, authorities have blatantly ignored demands for accountability,” said Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Human Rights Council member states should take action at their current session to support the establishment of an international fact-finding mechanism if there ever is to be justice for the disastrous Beirut blast.”
Guinea: Massacre Trial Awaits Landmark Verdict
(Brussels) – Judges are set to deliberate on a verdict in a landmark domestic trial in Guinea for gross human rights abuses committed by government security forces in 2009, Human Rights Watch said today. The closing arguments of all parties in the trial concluded on June 26, 2024. The judges indicated they will deliberate on a verdict until July 31.
The trial examines one of Guinea’s worst episodes of abuse. On September 28, 2009, Guinean security forces opened fire on a peaceful protest against a bid for the presidency by the then-coup leader Moussa Dadis Camara. More than 150 people were killed and more than 100 women were raped in a stadium in Conakry, the capital. Security forces then engaged in a cover-up, burying bodies in mass graves.
“All eyes will be on Conakry as the long-awaited verdict will provide a measure of reckoning with the brutal abuses of nearly 15 years ago, the effects of which continue to be felt by victims and survivors,” said Tamara Aburamadan, international justice counsel at Human Rights Watch. “The Guinean government should support further national accountability efforts to strengthen its system for addressing serious international crimes.”
Guinean victims and survivors have repeatedly called for revealing the truth and holding those responsible for the brutal 2009 events to account.
This trial is the first of its kind involving human rights violations of this scale in Guinea. It has widely captured the nation’s attention, amid a sustained crackdown on the opposition, dissenters, and the media, leaving hundreds dead and hundreds more injured at the hands of state security forces in Guinea, according to a report by Amnesty International.
Since the trial commenced on September 28, 2022, judges have heard from each of the 11 accused, among them a former president and government ministers, more than 100 victims, and over a dozen witnesses, including high-level government officials. Before the closing arguments started on May 13, judges heard again from three of the accused, among others, during what is known as the “confrontations” phase.
Over the past few weeks, all parties in the trial presented their closing arguments. Thirteen lawyers acting as civil parties – that is, victims with a standing in the case – were followed by the prosecution and the defense counsel for the 11 accused.
Based on Human Rights Watch’s monitoring of the trial and media reports, the victims’ lawyers laid out the horrific events of 2009 and detailed the alleged individual criminal responsibility of each of the accused. Some of the victim’s lawyers requested convictions for crimes against humanity and life sentences for the accused.
In the event of convictions, at least five victims’ lawyers asked the judges to grant a range of reparations claims – between one to three billion Guinean francs (approximately US$115,000 to $345,000) – for each group of victims, including those who have suffered physical and psychological trauma.
Many victims, including survivors of rape and sexual violence, still lack the resources to access medical care for the injuries they suffered in the attack on the stadium and the events that followed, according to the Association of Victims, Relatives and Friends of September 28, 2009.
During the closing arguments phase, the prosecution restated its March request to reclassify the charges to crimes against humanity against the 11 accused and further requested sentences ranging from 14 years to life. Judges have indicated they will only rule on the reclassification of charges request when delivering the verdict.
The defendants include Claude Pivi, a former government minister who remains a fugitive at the time of writing after leaving the detention facility in November 2023 with armed forces and three others of the highest-level accused, including former President Dadis Camara. All the other ten accused, including the three who left the detention facility, are now detained.
In its closing arguments, the defense counsel requested acquittals and responded to the prosecution’s reclassification of charges request. They argued that issuing a reclassification decision at the time of the verdict would violate fair trial rights of the accused, leaving them without the opportunity to defend against the new charges.
Guinean law on criminal procedure provides for internationally accepted rights of the accused, including the right to adequate time and facilities to prepare a defense and the right to a fair hearing.
After the verdict is delivered, the accused and the civil parties have the right to appeal within 15 days. The prosecution has two months to appeal.
Over the years, Guinea’s international partners, including the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States, have encouraged advances in the pursuit of justice for the September 28, 2009 crimes in Guinea. The International Criminal Court (ICC) Office of the Prosecutor also sought to constructively engage with the Guinean authorities to press them to deliver on their early commitment to bring justice in this case.
The role of international actors, including the ICC, appears to have been a major factor in galvanizing progress over time. Continued international support and engagement with the Guinean authorities on the critical importance of justice, including reparations processes, will be essential.
“The conclusion of the stadium massacre trial and the prospect of a verdict provide a glimmer of hope for Guinean victims and survivors that justice can prevail over impunity,” Aburamadan said. “They deserve to see justice realized in a manner that is fair and effective.”